Steampunk: The New Antiquarians

New York Times-- FOR many, it seems, the smooth surfaces of modern design have lost their allure.

Hollister, left, and Porter Hovey, are sisters with an appetite for late 19th-century relics like apothecary cabinets and dressmakers' dummies.

Hollister and Porter Hovey, sisters age 30 and 26, used a chain from Home Depot to lash a crystal chandelier to a crossbeam in the ceiling of their loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But it is one of the few contemporary objects in a habitat that embraces, among other cultural touchstones, W. Somerset Maugham’s last days of colonialism, Victorian memento mori and the Edwardian men’s club. There are also apothecary cabinets, fencing masks and pith helmets, stacks of antique luggage and a taxidermy collection that would make Teddy Roosevelt proud.

Hollister Hovey has been blogging for two years about what she considers a personal passion for this “new vintage” style. Yet the sepia-toned and “extremely previous lifestyle” that she and her sister lead, in the words of Megan Wilson, 43, a book designer and blogger with a similar world view, is one that is gaining traction beyond the Hoveys’ living room.

Taxidermy, clubby insignia and ancestral portraits have been decorative staples at trendy Lower East Side restaurants and clothing stores for a while, but now they are catching on at home.

It was probably inevitable. Consider the example of new-vintage merchants like J. Crew Liquor, the men’s wear store housed in an old TriBeCa bar. Or Freemans Sporting Club, the “gentleman’s” clothing store created by Taavo Somer, the architect and restaurateur responsible for Freemans, the taxidermy-bedecked hot spot on the Lower East Side. The recently opened bar at the Jane hotel, created by Eric Goode and Sean MacPherson, is a mash-up of an English country estate, the set of “The Royal Tenenbaums” and an interior landscape imagined by Joris-Karl Huysmans, the author of “Against Nature,” the 19th-century decadent’s manifesto.

It was only a matter of time until the “dark nostalgia” of such environments — as Eva Hagberg, a design writer, characterizes it in a book of the same name, out this fall from Monacelli Press — made its way home.

Not since Ralph Lauren moved into the Rhinelander mansion more than two decades ago have so many merchants focused on exhuming the accouterments of the turn-of-the-19th-century leisure class. But while Lauren’s market was Manhattan’s Upper East Side establishment (or those who wished to belong to it), the current one lives miles south of East 72nd Street and couldn’t care less about social provenance.

“My interests are old things from different periods,” said Sean Crowley on a recent steamy Friday night. Despite the heat, Mr. Crowley wore a pink gingham dress shirt, khaki pants and black velvet loafers with green and black striped socks. While this uniform has traditionally signaled conservatism, Mr. Crowley’s politics cleave determinedly to the left.

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